Decoding Conspiratorial Rhetoric in Sir Henry Wotton’s Diplomatic Correspondence on the Jesuits: A Historian’s Analysis with AI Assistance

Abstract As part of this special issue on the digital humanities and AI turn in Jesuit Studies, this article demonstrates how carefully supervised computational frameworks can augment historical interpretation by surfacing patterns that traditional close reading alone may under-emphasize. The contribution is not technological novelty but historical clarity: how did early modern diplomats craft epistemic credibility under uncertainty? We use the historian-led, AI -assisted Grammar of Conspiracy Matrix Analysis ( GCMA ) to examine Sir Henry Wotton’s diplomatic correspondence (1590–1610), showing how anti-Jesuit conspiratorial rhetoric functioned as information warfare. By “conspiracy,” we mean not a judgment about psychological pathology, but a narrative structure—a way of rendering hidden agency legible and actionable. Conspiratorial rhetoric employs specific linguistic markers (modal verbs, attributional frames, conditional syntax, hedged inferences) to stabilize uncertainty as usable knowledge. Our study asks: how did Wotton calibrate conspiratorial language for different audiences (a minister, a king, peer ambassadors)? What linguistic and procedural mechanisms allowed him to transform rumor into policy-moving intelligence? Analyzing correspondence with Robert Cecil, King James I , Edward La Zouche, and Sir Thomas Edmondes, we argue that Wotton developed a disciplined “grammar of suspicion”—a replicable, teachable method adapted to addressee and context. This grammar was not idiosyncratic to Wotton; it was a technology of credibility that early modern diplomacy required. GCMA enables us to (1) quantify temporal shifts in evidentiary confidence across a corpus too large for human recall; (2) identify entity-level patterns (which individuals recur across conspiratorial vs. non-conspiratorial contexts); and (3) prevent interpretive drift through probabilistic aggregation. The result: conspiracy talk did not merely reflect Protestant–Jesuit antagonism—it structured the terms of diplomatic engagement. We conclude that a replicable framework for analyzing conspiracy discourse across early modern diplomatic archives offers both a substantive contribution to Jesuit studies and a portable methodology for future scholars.